by Walter Chaw Richard Kwietniowski's Owning Mahowny charts the mendacity of addiction with something like a poet's lyrical melancholy. The director's follow-up to his surprisingly gentle take on Thomas Mann, Love and Death on Long Island, finds another story of obsessive love that is itself obsessed with the importance of place in defining the accumulated essence of identity and desire. Kwietniowski's films seem to be about secret outsiders finding themselves at some point swept out to proverbial sea, the land fading fast. While in Love and Death on Long Island that divorce illustrates the reach traversed by reclusive novelist Giles De'Ath (John Hurt) to claim his inamorata, in Owning Mahowny, the widening gyre is considerably (and deliciously) more complicated; the film marks Kwietniowski's emergence as the most promising cartographer of self-confessional mortification since countryman Terence Davies. And Kwietniowski does it all with gentle, uncompromising humour.

his role as one of John Cusack's sidekicks in High Fidelity (star-struck employees hovered around us, hoping for a word), I was more excited to talk to him about his vocal cameo in the late, lamented series "The Critic", as well as, of course, his first foray into directing with the remarkable Love Liza. Clad in the epitome of unassuming casual, Mr. Louiso seemed surprised that I had a complete filmography for him and embarrassed that I wanted to talk about his career in some detail--reactions both that speak to not only the investment that most of my peers take in researching their topic, but to a certain quality of Mr. Louiso: an unforced modesty that charms. Over the course of our interview, we talked about all manner of things and particularly, fascinatingly, of his passages over water.

by Bryant Frazer The 1990s were unkind to John Carpenter: The stock market was booming, there was a Democrat in the White House, and the American horror film was at a low ebb. That was the decade when Carpenter--arguably the best B-movie auteur in the world during the 1980s and certainly the most audacious--lost his mojo. Exhausted from the experience of making two genre classics (They Live and Prince of Darkness) back to back, Carpenter took a couple of years off from filmmaking. When he was ready to work again, he considered making The Exorcist III but eventually settled on an ill-fated Chevy Chase vehicle, the $40 million sci-fi adaptation Memoirs of an Invisible Man, that torpedoed his attempted return to big-budget filmmaking. Carpenter tore through three more projects in the next three years--the Showtime horror anthology Body Bags, the Lovecraft riff In the Mouth of Madness, and a Village of the Damned remake--before deciding to pillage his own back catalogue with a sequel to the dystopian Escape from New York.